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I’m so happy to make the music free ’cause I want everyone to enjoy it but if you’d like to help support Pulco and you have a spare moment, I’d be extremely grateful if you could mention Pulco & post links to the EP on Twitter, Facebook etc and to blog and talk about the tunes on and offline. Conversation is the greatest compliment that an artist can receive !!

Recently a few kind people have been asking me about how I make my music and the equipment that I use to record.

I thought it might be interesting and potentially useful if I outlined my setup and approach to music making in a little more detail and publish it here on the blog as a resource for others.

So, as Dylan Thomas famously declared – ‘to begin at the beginning’!!

My first experience of home recording began with a small cassette player that my dad bought in the early 80’s to load games on to our home computer. It’s important to emphasise what an amazing discovery it was and how it felt to be able to hear your own voice on tape for the first time. – “What! – you mean I can record myself on this thing AND play it back??”

It dawned on me that the complexities of sound were something of wonder and beauty and that like any of our senses, our hearing and our recognition of sound is a unique, subjective and personal thing.

I also recognised straight away that the hiss, grot and background ambience that found its way on to my recording was equally as interesting as the songs I was writing. The two worked hand in hand. Especially in the context of the environment in which the sound was captured. Recordings became a document of my life and the home that I lived in as opposed to being created in the confines of a recording studio where the objective would be to remove as much background noise as possible.

That part of recording in studios always disappointed me a little, as if it was an opportunity missed somehow. I hate losing sound!

So this was how my musical journey continued in to my teens. I began to understand the technicalities of what I was doing and as such my ambition grew as well as my appetite for experimentation. I just got excited by what I could make out of sound.

I think that I acquired my first cassette 4 track when I was 14 in 1986?

I understood immediately how the thing worked as it was so intuitive. That was the beauty of porta studios. You plugged in a mic, got a level and pressed record. It was all I needed to know about the science of recording and it still is to this very day.

I worked my Tascam to death – literally!! We used to use it to play backing tracks when I was in Derrero and eventually too many bits in it got worn and it lost the will to live.

By this time too we were busy recording as a band in a regular recording studio and contrary to my earlier remark I was enjoying the experience of discovering how studios worked and the possibilities of what we could achieve so at least for while I didn’t replace the Tascam and home recording stopped.

It wasn’t long however before I felt the need to work at home again

Over the years I’ve used Cubase a little bit, although I was never particularly comfortable using a PC, and I did have digital 8 track machine for a time as well. I’ve used minidisc and a hand held recorder but nothing came close to the ease of using a 4-track. I wanted a recording device that would be my friend and companion as I worked my way through my musical ideas. I didn’t need the hassle of fighting leads, sound cards, memory cards and plugins!!! arrr

Back in 2012 my wife bought me an iPad for my 40th birthday and I knew that there were likely to be apps on there that would allow me to record and get access to keyboards and drum machines etc.

I was excited by the possibilities of the device as I knew it was so easy to use

I tried a number of different apps but eventually discovered Multitrack DAW

The app costs about £7 and gives you 24 tracks of recording, basic eq, compression & reverb etc. All you need to do is get a level and hit record!! mmmmm hang on, that sounds familiar !!

I don’t even have to plug in a mic as the iPads internal mic works just fine for me although I did try a mic by a company called iRig which was quite good. The company also make interfaces for connecting instruments etc

For now though there is no so much more to say about how I record. I have a few cheap guitars, a little Fender practice amp, a drum kit and myself. The important thing for me is that the iPad is something I can pop in a bag and take with me anywhere. I can work in the car while the kids are at gym class or I can go up the mountain and record the stream after a storm. That is priceless to me and far out weights any limitations of the setup in terms of quality. I try and make a feature out of the limitations and I hope that is what makes my music unique to me.

Hi Folks !! If you tuned in to my previous post on Wednesday you will be fully aware of the Nurse With Wound list . If your here for the first time I suggest you scroll down this page to find out what its all about.

A little while ago I came across the Nurse With Wound list .Thisis a list of obscure outsider & avant garde musicians and bands that were printed on the front cover of ‘Chance Meeting on a Dissecting Table of a Sewing Machine and an Umbrella’, the first album by experimental band Nurse with Wound in 1979.

I’ve begun working my way through the list over the past week and there is some amazing stuff to discover on it as well as a few old favorites.

I know that I’m certainly not the first to post about this and there is a lot of information out there on the web regarding the list & Nurse With Wound but if you’d like to join me on my own personal journey through the music I’ve provided a list of the A’s below and links to the albums to make each of them easier to listen to.

I’ll post further links as I move through the alphabet so keep popping back here if your interested in discovering some truly diverse and irregular music!

Many years ago I read a book by William Burroughs & Brion Gysin called The Third Mind. It is a collection of essays & poems showcasing their ideas of cut up and collage poetry. Cut-ups involve taking texts, cutting the pages, and then rearranging and combining the pieces to form new narratives.

The idea of using cut & paste and collage in musical composition isn’t new either. In fact I believe that Pavement used cut ups to generate lyrics and musical sections as did Cabaret Voltaire but the concept is also something that’s interested me for years too.

Combined with a love of found sound and field recording many of these elements have found their way into my own tunes over the years. If I’m recording a guitar why not have the TV on in the background and the kids shouting downstairs, a dog barking outside or the sound of a passing car. All of these things make a recording infinitely more interesting in my mind. Very often I grab lyrics at random from the first book or magazine I find. I’m cutting up in real time.

As an example of how I approach composing music with all of these various elements in mind here is the process I have used to begin writing the first song for the next Pulco album.

I started with three separate abstract guitar riffs played to a click track to which I added bass and a 2nd guitar. After creating a rhythm loop to make a frame for the piece to work around I copied and moved about these three sections to create an arrangement for the song. Finally I put in some random bits including a recording of my daughter Myfi playing piano with her teacher. It sounds like a piece that could have been recorded all the way through in that structure (like some bastard son of Beefhearts Trout Mask Replica) when in fact it was shuffled around and constructed in my iPad.

Simon Jeffes from the Penguin Café Orchestra once explained the need for experimentation and innovation in music and it has always rung true with how I feel about it as well. He stated that the qualities of randomness, spontaneity, surprise, unexpectedness and irrationality in music are a very precious thing. If you suppress that to have a nice orderly commercially acceptable approach to music making then you kill off what’s most important.

I’ve often spoken about Pulco music being a kind of sonic autobiography. I listen to my own music when I want to remember a certain period or event in my life and I know which albums represent each part of that life journey. It gives me a context for my life and comforts me in the fact that I can return to the past through sound.

Constructing songs in this way is also an attempt to establish a new form of readability to the experience of hearing compositions that are still essentially pop or folk music.

I think that using a cut-up/found sound technique as a basis for writing music helps the listener create new connections to musical themes and the world around them and naturally as a consequence the range of vision and interpretation of our understanding of sound also expands.

I’m not going to say much about the album except that it has now consumed my life for over a year and despite various attempts to fine a way to release it in the glorious technicolor fashion that it deserves it has sat unheard on my computer.Therefore I have decided to just get the album out to you all and if an opportunity presents itself then these songs may find themselves appearing on triple gate fold vinyl at some point in the future ;0)

Until that happens you can now download Innovation In The Trade for free at the link below. All I ask is that if you like the album please tell your friends.

This post is something of an update for those of you that may be wondered whats happening with the new Pulco album. Innovation In The Trade has been revamped and is now complete. More details on it’s release to come in the next month or so but for now here is a little bit of info about the album.

It’s funny how songs come together

I’d started with an idea of recording a number of abstract live drum loops as a basis for each song after being inspired again by the awesome rhythms on Captain Beefhearts’ Trout Mask Replica.

I knew I’d end up with a set of gnarly off the wall guitar songs and I also made a decision not to use any acoustic guitar either.

I found myself exploring the idea of monologues and short stories and was determined to find a way to include some of these on the album.

During my summer holidays I bought a book of poetry by Adrian Henri in a small bookshop in Aberaeron. His words were perfect for the edgy verbal approach that I had in mind and I’ve actually used loads of his poems for lyrics on the album.

On a musical level a chance thought lead me back to listen again to a Fall CD that I’d never really taken much notice of before. My thoughts also drifted back to the cut & paste approach of Pavement. I think that the sounds of both bands had a big part in the making of Innovation In The Trade.

I terms of an overall direction for the album, the final bridge that I crossed was to immerse myself in a growing love of all things DADA. Part of the Dadaist manifesto says – ‘ Reject reason and logic. Prize nonsense, irrationality and intuition’. That makes perfect sense to me.